I have always liked teamwork. OK...maybe not always. As a younger man, I was an extreme introvert...did not like team sports at all. So I played singles tennis for a sport, and ran track for a brief time. I did not want the burden of either having to manage or interact with other team mates, or having to live up to someone else's expectations. I competed for me and only me.

As a young adult, that started to shift. The enjoyment of winning a competition with a team was exhilarating, more so when I felt that I had positively contributed. Football, basketball, doubles tennis, ultimate Frisbee...I never turned down an invitation to do something on the playing field. This led to an even more voracious appetite for working with and managing teams in the workplace, hence my current employ as a project team lead.

As a gamer, this enjoyment has persisted. Nothing is more rewarding in gameplay than participating in a team-based competition, whether against other (human) players or computer-controlled AI, and working closely together to succeed. My first real enjoyment came with games of Rogue Spear played on my home LAN against computer controlled tangoes with ****ates from the training school. Once I experienced the joy of Xbox Live at a friend's house and then proceeded to get my own subscription, I was in an environment that I doubt I will leave for some time.

My time on XBL playing team-based games has been enjoyable, and my excitement at coming titles that will bring more of the same is palpable. As I prep for the holiday season, I have begun a cursory review of both the titles that have brought the most enjoyable team-play for me to date, as well as the impending releases that look to hook me with this same essence.

First and foremost has been my time spent in Sega's game of mechanized combat, Chromehounds. As a gear-head and amateurish engineer, I was first attracted to the game by the ability to construct and design Hounds of your own design. I spent hours in the garage balancing power supply, heat dissipation, mobility, defensive plating, and mobility. As much fun as that was, it paled in comparison to participating and running my online squad. The Undying CTU played the game from its release until November, topping out at 14 members, when the holiday titles of 2006 attracted more of our attention. But the four months of gameplay, establishing standardized and situational tactics, team communications, and Hound loadouts was a blast. And we had a load of fun.

An almost imperceptible gap lies between Chromehounds and Project Gotham Racing 3 Cat-and-Mouse. So intense were some of my friends and I about this mode of gameplay that we organized our own C&M tournament before the official patch came out that supported it within PGR3. We had teams, ladders, eliminations, an entire rule-set that dealt with almost every imaginable contingency. The racing gameplay was very fluid and analogous to a game of hockey or hoops, with players dropping back from wolf tactics against the other team's mouse to defender roles if their mouse was lagging in the rear. Good teams chatted up the status of each of their players and their location on the track, and better players made sacrifices to keep other teammates in the game rather than pursue personal glory. As sharp as the racing experience was in PGR3 when you got into a room full of honorable racers who would not pit-maneuver you or bump-draft you into a wall, Cat-and-Mouse was the pinnacle of interacting with friends in-game. There were many sessions until 2 AM, and much sleep was lost.

Lagging not so far behind is Rainbow Six Vegas 2. With the re-spawns that are now available that were not in the first Vegas iteration, teammate's feel like they are participating much more in pursuing the end-goal. In the first Vegas, if you got wiped out, you just hung out like a nugget, your disembodied voice offering little more than distraction to your remaining teammates, and you honestly just hoped that they would get capped soon so you could get back into the action. The maps are much more challenging, with dozens of fatal funnels of fire presented at multiple corners, and AI terrorists attack from multiple points of elevation. Even in Terrorist Hunt, it takes a team that is not just running around every corner blindly firing like Han Solo in order to survive and do well. I have only been playing for a month or so, but the three members of my friends list who are really into it and I have been having a blast.

Of all the multi-player teamwork experiences that I am looking forward to this holiday season is Rock Band 2. I got in apparently too late on the Rock Band phenomenon and now the trendy appeal of it has lessened. There have been fewer and fewer Rock Band parties, and the payback in on-line multiplayer is diminished by the fact hat you can not have a persistent band career; only set-play is allowed. RB2 promises to bring the Rock Band Tour mode into online play, which means being able to get on the tour bus with friends in neighboring towns and back home without having to leave the comfort of my game room. Rock Band has that allure that I have not experienced since being in the band back in high-school, where you feel like missing a note is letting your fellow band members down.

The original Red Faction is one of the few games that I have actually finished, so I am a little partial to the franchise, although I skipped the second installment due to its poor reviews and departure from the original storyline. I am looking forward to the 3rd episode though, due primarily to the dynamically spawning battlefield events that are wrapped into the multi-player package; that and the thought of experiencing destructible environments with some of my more destructive friends. I expect there will be few buildings left standing, or much of anything else for that matter, when those guys party up. Hopefully the title will keep the full head of development steam that it has apparently gathered, and come across the finish line bringing all of the final polish that its current potential appears to be capable of achieving.

My relationship with Gears of War died a pretty quick death. It is one of those titles that bring the swearing, trash-talking, adolescent-minded denizens that make up a large contingent of the global Xbox Live membership rushing to its game lobbies. That scorned relationship however, has been somewhat repaired by the Wednesday-night sessions with Casual Adult Gamers (CAG). It is a great bunch of guys and girls and playing in our private lobbies offers some refuge from the type of behavior that none of us feel like putting up with after we clear hump-day in cubicle-land. Just about everyone in that core group is planning on shifting to Gears 2 almost immediately upon its release, so COG versus Locust will again be the name of the game. Connectivity is sucking out here in Oakland, so I am unable to do a lot of research, but I believe that I heard that GoW2 will also have multiplayer co-op, beyond the two-player limit in that mode that was imposed in the first version. OK...EDGE connection via my wireless modem is not as bad as I thought...right now, anyway. Confirmed, GoW2 will have a 5-player co-op mode. While not based on the campaign, the mode will offer up to 5 players the ability to participate in a frag-and-chainsaw fest against ever increasing numbers of Locusts which attack in waves.

Team-play rocks. In truth, I would much rather play with a bunch of friends against enemy AI rather than against other people. The cheesy tactics, exploits, and glitches that human opponents employ is removed, and the trash-talking between rounds goes away. Whichever modes these three titles offer, I am looking forward to some well-deserved time off this last quarter of the year. A few decent team-based titles to while some of that time away with will not go unappreciated.

Game-on, and take care.
- Vr/G.